Advances in Evidence-Based Policing
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Advances in Evidence-Based Policing

Johannes Knutsson, Lisa Tompson, Johannes Knutsson, Lisa Tompson

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eBook - ePub

Advances in Evidence-Based Policing

Johannes Knutsson, Lisa Tompson, Johannes Knutsson, Lisa Tompson

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About This Book

The evidence-based policing (EBP) movement has intensified in many countries around the world in recent years, resulting in a proliferation of policies and infrastructure to support such a transformation. This movement has come to be associated with particular methods of evaluation and systematic review, which have been drawn from what is assumed to prevail in medicine.

Given the credibility EBP is currently enjoying with both practitioners and government, it is timely to subject its underpinning logic to thoughtful scrutiny. This involves deliberating upon the meaning of evidence and what different models of knowledge accumulation and research methods have to offer in realising the aims of EBP. The communication and presentation of evidence to practitioner audiences is another important aspect of EBP, as are collaborative efforts to 'co-produce' new knowledge on police practice.

This is the first book that takes a kaleidoscopic approach to depict what EBP presently is and how it could develop. The chapters individually and collectively challenge the underlying logic to the mainstream EBP position, and the book concludes with an agenda for a more inclusive conceptualisation of evidence and EBP for the future. It is aimed at students and academics who are interested in being part of this movement, as well as policymakers and practitioners interested in integrating EBP principles into their practices.

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Information

Publisher
Routledge
Year
2017
ISBN
9781315518275
Subtopic
Criminology
Edition
1

1 Introduction

Johannes Knutsson and Lisa Tompson
The momentum of the evidence-based policing (EBP) movement has intensified in many countries around the world in recent years, resulting in a proliferation of policies and infrastructure to support such a sea change. So what is it about this moment in policing history that makes EBP such an attractive guiding philosophy? And second, to what extent does EBP actually bring novel and practically useful insights in support of more effective policing?
Given the credibility EBP is currently enjoying with both practitioners and government, it is timely to subject its underpinning logic to thoughtful scrutiny. This involves deliberating upon the meaning of evidence and what different models of knowledge accumulation and research methods have to offer in realising the aims of EBP. The communication and presentation of evidence to practitioner audiences are also important aspects of EBP, as are collaborative efforts to ‘co-produce’ new knowledge on police practice. This is the first book that takes a kaleidoscopic approach to depict what EBP is now and how it could develop. It is aimed at students and academics who are interested in being part of this movement, as well as policymakers and practitioners interested in integrating EBP principles into their practices.
Presently the stars have aligned to support the transition to EBP, encouraged by actors across many different fields of interest, including, but not limited to, scholars, policymakers, governments and practitioners (Sherman, 2013). A critical mass of voices in support of the notion that policing practices need to be rooted in an evidence base has thus been reached.
The forces leading to this tipping point come from several directions. A recurrent theme is a political fixation on the efficiency and effectiveness of public services, which becomes especially acute in times of austerity. Evidence-based practice has percolated from other fields and policy areas, where it has been used to justify public spending decisions and to reassure funders that their returns on investment are being maximised. Hence EBP is part of a wider movement in what might be dubbed the ‘era of evidence’.
Contemporaneously, the context in which the police operate has changed rapidly in the twenty-first century (Mawby and Wright, 2008). Revolutions in technology and communication have transformed social interaction and, as a natural consequence, offending and victimisation. In many places communities have become more diverse and, accordingly, the needs of the public, and their expectations of the police, have become more personalised and nuanced. Both social life and crime have thus become more multifaceted.
The complexity of modern problems, such as counterterrorism, human trafficking, child sex abuse and cybercrime, places a heavy demand on the police (Loader and Mulcahy, 2003). In times of drastically reduced public spending, overtime budgets cannot be depended on to produce the resources needed to deal with such demands. Instead, responding to these crime types requires staff with specialist skills who are able to use their knowledge judiciously. Such personnel are presently in short supply in many police services.
Other aspects of policing are similarly ill equipped to deal with this contemporary reality. For example, command-and-control structures have served policing sufficiently in the twentieth century, but are no longer up to navigating the complexity of social problems that generate crime, and are suboptimal for the organisational flexibility that is required to deal with them (Herrington and Colvin, 2015). Traditional hierarchical police management styles have led to a system where accountability for decisions falls upon senior managers, whereas frontline staff are expected to comply with procedures rather than think. In part, this explains why the training of frontline staff has, until recently, emphasised procedural knowledge over critical thinking skills and codified evidence.
Relatedly, in response to high-profile scandals and mistakes involving police officer decision-making, government-led reforms in democratic countries have sought to standardise police procedure both within and between agencies over recent decades. Such prescriptive processes have removed the scope for police discretion and may have contributed to the ‘deskilling’ of officers (Heslop, 2011) and promoted a culture of risk aversion (Flanagan, 2008).
In brief, then, expectations on the roles and responsibilities of the police service have been escalating at the same time that fiscal constraints have severely restricted the resources that are available to adequately respond to these demands. New and more imaginative ways of working are thus sorely needed (Laycock, 2014). For many, professionalisation is the solution to these issues,1 with the ambition of transforming police officers and staff into reflective and enquiring practitioners who can be trusted to make discretionary decisions and spend public money wisely.
Although the police may be a service that often acts professionally, it is not, presently, a professional service (Neyroud, 2011). Amongst others, Kennedy (2015) has lucidly argued that policing bears none of the hallmarks of a profession. That is, the police service does not currently have the means of educating practitioners to think systematically about police practices. It similarly does not expect or support continual professional development that relates to research evidence. And, crucially, it does not assess performance against standards established or supported by research.
So what is required to induce such a transformation to a police profession? Reviewing the traditional professions – medicine and law – reveals a number of defining features. Both require extensive training to enter, both have a codified set of research evidence from which all professional practice and knowledge is drawn, both are regulated by codes of ethics and national professional bodies (in the UK at least) and both expect members to actively develop the evidence base on which their profession is founded. In recent decades a number of occupations, such as dentistry, nursing, engineering, architecture and accountancy, have gained the status of professions in some countries by adopting these defining features.
Evidence and knowledge are tightly bound into notions of being a profession. Autonomous practitioners making discretionary decisions need to be well versed in what is known about multiple practice areas and what action is best to take in varying circumstances. Different role specialisations require different sorts of knowledge, at different levels within an organisation, for tactical and strategic decision-making. Arguably, transforming policing into a profession would increase the ‘appetite’ or ‘demand’ for evidence and thus be the necessary precursor to police officers welcoming research evidence into their decision-making (Kennedy, 2015).
The professionalisation of police education has been part of a general trend in Europe and other parts of the world for some time, albeit with varying results. This has involved developing closer ties with universities, as well as developments in police education organisations, such as the Police University Colleges in Norway and Finland, and the Police University in Germany. In the UK, to bring the police service in line with other public service professions, graduate entry is to be phased in. The situation in the United States is more complex given its fragmented policing systems.
The movement in support of EBP has been supported and partly shaped by practitioners at the grassroots level. Since 2010 dedicated professional societies have been established, largely by police officers, in the UK, the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Centres supporting collaborations between practitioners and academics have been created in universities and research institutions across many westernised democracies. Funding streams have opened up to nurture the development of personal and professional networks that straddle both the supply and demand of research evidence.
From all of this it would seem that we are currently living within a unique era of policing – where the early adopters of a new philosophy are proliferating and collectively are aiming for a paradigm shift towards a new style of policing (Sherman, 2015). This is why it is timely to look carefully at what EBP is and might become so that the movement takes directions that most benefit the police service and the public served by the police.

Reflections on the journey so far

Although the term EBP was coined in the late 1990s, the idea that police should utilise research evidence when conducting their business, and that research should be a cooperative effort by researchers and police, has a long history. Early studies like the Kansas City Preventive Patrol Experiment (Kelling et al., 1974) and the Newark Foot Patrol Experiment (Police Foundation, 1981) nowadays have an iconic status, although their influence has perhaps shaped debates on how the police should operate, rather than on actual policing itself. As the titles indicate, both were experiments, although they did not include randomised allocation to experimental and control groups. Instead they followed quasi-experimental designs. The combined message, if taken on its face value, is to decrease random preventive car patrol and to increase targeted foot patrol. Even if there has been a repeated strong political demand for this to happen, often with references to these studies, police organisations find it difficult to act on the evidence provided by the studies (see e.g. Mclean and Hillier, 2011; Holgersson and Knutsson, 2012).
These studies were published by the US Police Foundation, established in 1970. Its mission was – and still is – to support policing through research, often in the form of social experiments. In the organisation’s own words:
its leadership has insisted that the organization’s work have a practical impact on policing, that the knowledge gained through empirical investigation be such that it could be applied outside the “laboratory,” with the end result being improvement in the way that police do their work.
(www.policefoundation.org/about)
Partly by using some of these early studies to support his arguments, in the late 1970s, Herman Goldstein formulated an evidence-based policing model (Goldstein, 1979). In this, he drew on research evidence to challenge the efficacy of three core functions of the dominant ‘professional’ policing model2 – preventive patrol, rapid response and solving crimes to catch offenders (Kelling et al., 1974; Greenwood and Petersilia, 1975; Pate et al., 1976). In essence Goldstein’s (1979) proposed philosophy of problem-oriented policing offered a roadmap for the police to leave a reactive mode of policing and enter a proactive preventive mode.
It was not just in United States that practical police research began to be conducted in the 1970s. It was also supported in UK, for example, by various groups in the British Home Office (the Home Office Research Unit, the Crime Prevention Unit and later the Police Research Group) and in Sweden by the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention where evaluation studies were included among their work programmes (see e.g. for the UK Forrester, Chatterton and Pease, 1988, and for Sweden KĂŒhlhorn, 1978 and Knutsson, 1984).
Thus, the idea that applied police research – research for and with the police (Cockbain and Knutsson, 2015) – should provide evidence for the police is nothing new. The novelty of the first incarnation of EBP was the proposed standard of what was to be judged useful and reliable evidence, how it should be generated and how it should be systematised and made available to the police.
It was with this in mind that the term EBP first appeared in a report from the Police Foundation (Sherman, 1998). This drew heavily upon experience in medical science and argued that the research designs commonly used in medicine should be used as the quality yardstick for policing research. Central to this is the notion that randomised controlled trials (RCTs) generate the strongest evidence for forming an evidence base on policing. This idea has later been forcefully championed by other proponents of EBP (e.g. Weisburd and Neyroud, 2011).
The parallel organisation to the Cochrane Collaboration for medicine – the Campbell Collaboration – was founded with the express purpose of producing systematic reviews in social policy, thereby developing an evidence base for practice. The reviews emanating from this organisation commonly aspire to the conventions of the Cochrane collaboration, that is, to (ideally) meta-analyse RCTs to arrive at reliable judgements of the effectiveness of different interventions or policing practices. The overarching intent is to synthesise and summarise the evidence base on a topic so that it is readily available to inform decision-making in policy and practice. The Campbell Collaboration systematic reviews on police issues are, to a large extent, populated by quantitative studies of effectiveness, albeit only those fulfilling the inclusion criterions: RCTs or quasi-experimental designs with controls.
However, just as in medicine (Greenhalgh, 2014), the popularity of RCTs as a gold standard is waning in several scholarly communities. Sampson (2010) rejects the gold standard notion and argues that observational studies can produce strong evidence in the service of policy decisions. Tilley (2006, 2009) questions the feasibility, suitability and utility of RCTs to determine ‘what works’. Another line of criticism deals with the differences between the medical and policing professions (Kennedy, 2015), and that it is inappropriate that policing should aspire to ape the medical model – as Bradley and Nixon (2009) evocatively state, ‘arrests are not like aspirins’. Among other things Sparrow (2011) argues that police, when making reforms and introducing new practices, usefully draw on other sources of knowledge.
An example supporting Sparrow’s argument is white papers or committee reports that might come in the wake of major police failures and that stimulate reforms of policing. For example, following failure to take charge of riots or to police them in an acceptable manner, politically appointed committees might investig...

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